kwong-juh duh

3 posts categorized "Economics"

04/07/2014

I often find that it is the people who have the least who tend to give the most. And I don't mean they are giving hundreds of dollars - they may give $5 when they only make $10 or $13 an hour to start with. What I mean by "give the most" is that they give the most often. Whether it is helping the person at the check out line who is putting back something because they are short on money, or donating time/money to an animal rescue, they give freely not because they have an excess of resources but because they know what it is like to need.

I grew up poor. But my mom and I once drove home from a fast food restaurant at 10pm to get blankets for the couple that were living in their car in winter. We didn't have much, but we sure had more than that couple had. I'm not telling you this to show off my generousity or imply I'm special or deserve admiration. I'm telling you this because I want to inspire you to find ways that you can make a difference for people. Did the used spare blanket that was probably 5 years old mean as much to us as it did to that couple? Not a chance, it meant FAR FAR more to them. This is a phenomenon I call "The Exchange Rate of Kindness". I can give something trivial to me, and have it mean significantly more to someone in need. So while I don't attend church or believe in God, I tithe. I give directly to people in need. Sometimes they are charities. Usually they are individuals, like the guy at the gas station who humbly asked if I could help him out with a gallon of gas in his container, his car ran out about a block away. I filled his 2.5 gallon can, because I could. The $10 meant very little to me, compared to what it meant to him.

You don't have to hang out at the gas station waiting for someone to walk up with a red gas can. If you don't know where to start, here are a few people who could use a hand.

Trenton Crowl - A woman I went to high school with and haven't seen since 1990, she knows Trenton's family. In August 2012 on the day before Trenton turned 1, his mother's boyfriend suffocated him to get him to take a nap. The resulting brain damage has changed Trenton's life forever. Tonight he is back in the hospital having life threatening seizures. Whatever the outcome, his father and stepmother who now have full custody of Trenton could use your help.

Aidan Love - My best friend know's Aidan's family, they all take karate classes at the same dojo. In January 2014 Aidan was sick again, and his mom, a single parent on active duty with the Air Force took him to the doctor. His regular doctor who had been seeing him for the last three weeks was unavailable; the doctor he ended up seeing thought the prior diagnosis wasn't quite right and did more investigation... and discovered a massive lymphoma cancer throughout his chest and abdominal organs. Aidan is doing well with chemo and other cancer treatments, but is still a very sick little boy whose family is in upheaval focusing on his recovery.

Michael Morones has been in the news more than the other two children, he was an 11 year old so bullied at his school for being a brony that he attempted suicide. The brony community has raised $72k for his family and there is a big Broadway fundraiser hosted by Sir Ian McKellan coming up on April 14 2014, so while I financially support all three of these boys and their families and would encourage you to do the same, if you have limited resources it may be reasonable to help Trenton and/or Aidan's families first as they don't have the same level of community-driven financial support coming in.

If none of these causes is moving you to donate $5 or $25 or $100, find your own cause that you are passionate about. There are plenty of ways you can make the world a better place for your fellow man. I can recommend shelters for juvenile victims of sex trafficking, domestic violence shelters, homeless services such as soup kitchens and transitional housing, support centers for child victims of sexual abuse, international aid organizations to provide clean water or vaccines to villages...

You know how you feel when you get to the drive through window at Starbucks and the person ahead of you has "paid it forward"? You can do that pretty much anywhere - just do something nice for a stranger, with no expectation of direct repayment but the belief that the recipient will in turn do something good for someone else at some point. The more often you help strangers, the easier and more reflexive it gets. And you can involve your family, it is a great learning experience! My kids help choose what we donate to each month, and often they want to donate some of their own money as well.

Need more inspiration? Check out the One Spark Foundation. They have lots of easy and low cost ideas on how to make other people's day a little brighter.

01/30/2014

You might say I am being sensationalist or overdramatic, but I assure you that I am not.

If I were to serve my children a meal and then suddenly take the plate away and throw the food in the garbage, giving them only milk and a piece of fruit and telling them "daddy didn't pay the child support this month, you don't get dinner" I would be abusing my children emotionally, and probably physically by intentionally not feeding them a proper meal.

That is exactly what the Salt Lake City school district did at Uintah Elementary School. On Monday they tried to notify parents that had a balance due in their children's lunch accounts. Then on Tuesday, after children had been handed lunches, someone came and took the food away from the kids and threw it in the garbage because their parents hadn't deposited money into their lunch account yet. Maybe payday isn't until Friday. Maybe mom forgot. Who knows the reason, it is still totally unacceptable to take food away from a human being and throw it out.

Salt Lake City school district has just punished and humiliated children for an issue that was entirely out of their control and should have been handled directly with the parents. They just sent these children the message that "we would rather take food away from you and throw it in the garbage than let you eat it, that's how little you matter". No normal human being with a heart would have taken food away from children because of their parent's debt. The person who made this decision and every person responsible for carrying it out should be fired and not allowed to work with children ever again. They humiliated and emotionally scarred children, and for what? They didn't recover the money their parents owed, they didn't recover the money for the lunches they threw in the garbage, they simply wasted food and traumatized children. And while they may think they only hurt 40 kids (only! One would have been too many!) the reality is that every kid who saw this happen now has reason to fear their school lunch being taken away and thrown out too.

01/21/2014

If you have, make, or want money, and have an opinion on taxes, welfare, the socioeconomic class divide, Occupy Wall Street, "the 1%", or poverty, this is a good article to read: NYT: The Undeserving Rich

The first reason I like this article is because it points out how data is used to mislead people. As someone with training in statistics, data analysis and program evaluation, this pains me. I once had a Director at a Large Software Company I worked at ask me to analyze some data and write a report to support his program/hypothesis. I told him I could analyze the data, but that it may not say what he wanted it to. That is what data analysts are supposed to do. Not massage data into an elaborate edge case that says what you want it to. Data analysts are supposed to be mathematicians and scientists. We are supposed to objectively analyze data and identify significant correlations, trends, perhaps even causalities. We have to observe the results and intelligently communicate them - but we are not supposed to manipulate the results to say what we want them to, or to hide the truth of an issue!

The second reason I like this article is the second section (it really could be two separate articles) about the Myth of the Deserving Rich.

The story goes like this: America’s affluent are affluent because they made the right lifestyle choices. They got themselves good educations, they got and stayed married, and so on. Basically, affluence is a reward for adhering to the Victorian virtues.

What’s wrong with this story? Even on its own terms, it postulates opportunities that don’t exist. For example, how are children of the poor, or even the working class, supposed to get a good education in an era of declining support for and sharply rising tuition at public universities?

It is easy to tell ourselves that the poor are in that situation because they didn't work hard enough or made questionable life choices. In essence, they deserve to be poor. But the truth is that our country has an ever growing population of hard working people living in poverty. If they hit a streak of bad luck - get sick, have a car break down so they can't get to work, get laid off, etc, they may be homeless before they know it. Many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck not because they are shiftless slackers who don't want to work hard - they are living paycheck to paycheck because their job (or in some cases jobs) don't pay a living wage.

According to US Congresswoman Frederica Wilson of Florida, 50 million Americans (including 13 million children) are living in poverty, and there is only 1 job opening for every 3 applicants. A web search tells me that unemployment is at 7.3%, and the US population is 313.9 million, so I'll be the first to admit that I can't get this math to make sense to me yet. Neither do the assertions of the producers of American Winter, that 46% of America is living in or near poverty (what is the definition of "near poverty"?) I am still digging through data to find the truth. But watching American Winter, you cannot deny the brutal reality that working families face every day in America (don't try watching it without a box of kleenex handy). Quoting my friend Lizzie who is actively involved in helping homeless people in her community:

Absolutely anyone can end up homeless. It's easier (and more comfortable) to think its " those people". Distance keeps the very real and scary threat of poverty away. There are people who are mentally ill and drug addicted on the street, but in some cases they simply began without resources or proper family. The depression, PTSD, and addiction are aquired after a financial ruin. Hope is lost. Sleeping in a wash is a bit of a trick...a little medicine helps you sleep thru the night, a little more takes your mind off how utterly screwed you are. And then...addiction.

Many many Americans are 60 days away from catastrophe. There are former millionaires that are now homeless, people who got too old to work, abuse victims, products of the foster care system, veterans, isolated people, alone people, people who hit a rough patch and had no one to ask for help.

People. All kinds of people, anyone. You. Me. All of us. Not "those people" All people.

OK so maybe the Congresswoman's statistics are inflated and it isn't 50 million people living in poverty but only 25 million. Or maybe the American Winter filmmakers are right and it is closer to 150 million in or near poverty. Either way, it still doesn't mean those people deserveto be there with little hope of improving their situation. We don't have to give handouts, but for $DEITY sake we need to offer people a hand up and a way to get out of poverty. Opportunity and hope should be available to everyone in America, even the poor.

New in my reading queue: Bread For The World. I don't have the same faith they do, but I am interested in their goal to end hunger. It isn't job training or advocating for a living wage, but kids can't study when they are hungry (and that means their future potential is limited) and their parents can't do their best when they are stressed about how they will feed their kids.

I can't fix everything, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't at least try to make one thing better.